Mapping the unholy attraction of holy war

Jessica Stern has infuriated many Americans by looking beyond the religious to the political, financial and psychological aspects of terrorism.

A US academic is receiving hate mail for including Christian militants in her book on terrorists. By Marian Wilkinson.

Unlike many academic experts on terrorism and its causes, Jessica Stern decided she needed to talk to some terrorists, face to face.

Four years later, after having sat down with religious militants from Pakistan to Texas, she believes that terrorists find holy war addictive: psychologically, politically and financially.

War in the name of religion, she argues, puts a boundary between terrorists and their enemy, giving them a clear identity and a purpose to life, "a seductive state of bliss". The weak become strong, the selfish become altruists. A holy war allows militants to kill, while believing in their own purity.

But, just as importantly for the terrorist leader, a religious war pulls in big money, political support and willing martyrs.

Stern wanted to examine not only the political motivation for terrorism but how fear, humiliation and even financial motives encouraged terrorists. She explored how terrorist leaders, by intensifying these feelings of fear and humiliation among their followers, help to ignite holy wars.

A Harvard academic does not usually receive a lot of hate mail, but Stern is seeing her fair share since the release of her latest book, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. The book is based largely on interviews with religious militants and tries to look beyond the military solution of the "war on terrorism".

But her decision to investigate Christian and Jewish militants along with Islamic jihadists has infuriated some Americans. The anger, she told The Age, "is related to the notion that I could put Jews and Christians in the same book as Muslim terrorists. They say I want to psychoanalyse terrorists rather than kill them." One outraged reader accused Stern of bringing "a shameless message of moral equivalency" to the debate on terrorism. Another claimed she was justifying terror "at the expense of Christianity and Judaism".

In her book, Stern tells the story of a young militant, Firdous Syed, who retired from the holy war in Kashmir. He said that when he first turned to jihad as a teenager, he felt inspired by the Islamic victory over the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the revolution in Iran. And he was driven by a desire to fight the abuses suffered by Muslims in Palestine and Kashmir.

"This was the first generation of militancy. We were euphoric," he told her. But as the years of struggle dragged on and more young men died, Syed became frustrated watching Pakistani intelligence officers and religious leaders grow rich and powerful as cash poured in for the cause.

What was for him "a spiritual project" became for them "a conflict enterprise", he said.

Now, he told Stern, "when I see young Kashmiris donating their lives to what they think of as a jihad, I feel a deep sense of regret. I feel that we . . . initiated this destruction. With each generation, Islamic fundamentalism becomes uglier."

Before joining Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Stern was a former member of president Bill Clinton's National Security Council and "Superterrorism Fellow" at the US Council on Foreign Relations. But her attempts to examine terrorist motivation are being savagely dismissed by some critics as lightweight, even naively feminine.

"It's war, my dear," wrote one, "and it won't be won by flying in Doctors Without Borders to treat the 43rd son of Sheik Bandar."

But Stern says her research has convinced her that "a military response is utterly insufficient" to deal with terrorism and so, too, is looking for just one answer. "It's absurd to have an argument, 'Is poverty the root cause of terrorism?' " she says. "There are so many causes. You can't pretend poverty doesn't play a role; yet poverty doesn't explain the whole thing. People join these groups and stay in these groups for many different reasons, and we have to understand what makes them join and what makes them stay, and we can't have a comic-book approach."

Nowhere do all the causes come together so bleakly as in the Gaza Strip in the Middle East. There, Stern listened to the simple humiliations of Palestinians who lined up in their hundreds for hours at a border crossing where the few provided toilets were overflowing with excrement and where Israeli soldiers conducted arbitrary strip searches and interrogations. She heard angry Palestinian officials' claims that Jewish settlers were sucking the bulk of the strip's precious water into their greenhouses and how the Palestinians lived amid rampant violence and poverty under Israeli occupation.

Then she sat down with Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader, who said suicide bombers were Hamas's most cost-effective weapon, requiring just a detonator and a moment of "courage". "People acquire the courage to carry out attacks from having seen something terrible - some kind of atrocity," he told Stern.

"Islam says an eye for an eye. We believe in retaliation. When someone is killed in jihad, it is a joyful day."

A general from the Palestinian Authority's security wing explained how Hamas's extremely efficient social welfare organisation would look after the family of a shaheed, or martyr, with money, food and clothing, pay off their debts and treat them like heroes.

Many Muslims and Islamic scholars are deeply affronted by suicide bombers being treated as religious martyrs. In Islam, as in Christianity, murder and suicide are considered offences against religious laws. But the religious warriors justify both as part of their armed resistance. The death of non-combatant Jewish women and children, said one Hamas leader, was "collateral damage".

Stern also heard justifications for terrorism in America, at a Texas trailer park. Kerry Noble, a Christian extremist whose group firebombed a synagogue and a church that accepted homosexuals, told her that his members wanted to rid the world of Jews, blacks and sinners. "We wanted peace, but if the purging had to precede peace, then let the purge begin," he said.

Like many Americans, Stern is deeply worried by the growing anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. America's support for Israel, she says, is part of the reason. But she agrees with President George Bush that the failure of many Muslim states also creates despair and frustration among their citizens.

But where Stern fundamentally differs from Bush is on how to respond to terrorism from al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

Al-Qaeda, says Stern, "know how to watch us closely for our vulnerabilities; they engage in psychological warfare against us, trying to maximise our fear". Overt military operations, she warns, galvanise their supporters, boosting recruitment and fund-raising.

She wants to see more covert operations and a better human intelligence focus on al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Just as they penetrate Western cities with sleepers, "we need to penetrate them". She points to the case of John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban fighter, who was probably better informed about militant Islam than most CIA or FBI specialists. But Lindh, after his interrogations and trial, was sent to jail rather than co-opted into the fight against terrorism.

The fight against terrorism must be political, economic and spiritual rather than just military, she argues. The US should not be afraid to change policies that are inconsistent with its purported values. What counts in the end "is what we fight for, not what we oppose".